r. But they've not got off--they're not getting off.
When I see them--and I saw them this morning--they have showy reasons.
They do mean to go, but they've postponed it." With which the girl
brought out: "They've postponed it for _you_." He protested so far as a
man might without fatuity, since a protest was itself credulous; but
Kate, as ever, understood herself. "You've made Milly change her mind.
She wants not to miss you--though she wants also not to show she wants
you; which is why, as I hinted a moment ago, she may consciously have
hung back to-night. She doesn't know when she may see you again--she
doesn't know she ever may. She doesn't see the future. It has opened
out before her in these last weeks as a dark confused thing."

Densher wondered. "After the tremendous time you've all been telling me
she has had?"

"That's it. There's a shadow across it."

"The shadow, you consider, of some physical break-up?"

"Some physical break-down. Nothing less. She's scared. She has so much
to lose. And she wants more."

"Ah well," said Densher with a sudden strange sense of discomfort,
"couldn't one say to her that she can't have everything?"

"No--for one wouldn't want to. She really," Kate went on, "has been
somebody here. Ask Aunt Maud--you may think me prejudiced," the girl
oddly smiled. "Aunt Maud will tell you--the world's before her. It has
all come since you saw her, and it's a pity you've missed it, for it
certainly would have amused you. She has really been a perfect
success--I mean of course so far as possible in the scrap of time--and
she has taken it like a perfect angel. If you can imagine an angel with
a thumping bank-account you'll have the simplest expression of the kind
of thing. Her fortune's absolutely huge; Aunt Maud has had all the
facts, or enough of them, in the last confidence, from 'Susie,' and
Susie speaks by book. Take them then, in the last confidence, from
_me_. There she is." Kate expressed above all what it most came to.
"It's open to her to make, you see, the very greatest marriage. I
assure you we're not vulgar about her. Her possibilities are quite
plain."

Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what good
then on earth can I do her?"

Well, she had it ready. "You can console her."

"And for what?"

"For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn't
care for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said. And then as
it made him laug